Friday, March 04, 2005

That's odd, I was lead to believe that Arctic Ozone holes were the direct result of Humans?

I guess someone's not quite telling the entire truth:

Nitrogen oxides generated by solar particles are bad news for ozone.A stream of particles from the Sun, in combination with extreme weather conditions, caused an unprecedented thinning last year of the upper Arctic ozone layer.

Scientists have been puzzled by the chemical processes that destroyed up to 60% of ozone molecules in the lower mesosphere and upper stratosphere (the atmospheric layers that lie 30 to 40 kilometres above ground) in the first months of 2004. Reactions with chlorofluorocarbons (CFC), the compounds responsible for ozone depletion in the lower stratosphere, could not explain the decline in higher layers.

The article also goes on to say:"Ozone is a form of oxygen that shields the Earth from dangerous ultraviolet radiation from space. Ozone holes were first detected in the 1980s above the South Pole. Soon afterwards, CFCs were phased out under the 1987 Montreal Protocol. Ozone holes do still occur regularly in the Antarctic, but at high northern latitudes they are observed only in particularly cold winters."

So now we can start wondering, was there an Ozone hole BEFORE we had satelites to measure the Ozone layer?